Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (97)

Bright lights, big city...Where skin-deep is the
mode, your traditional domestic values are not going
to take root and flourish.
-Jay McInerney

It seems hard to account for the visceral loathing that Jay McInerney
provoked in critics after publishing this best-selling first novel.
Here's a typical comment from Weekly
Wire:

Hot young actor Ethan Hawke's first novel, The Hottest
State, is mostly reminiscent of what used
to pass for literary writing in the 1980s: a first
person narrative of a vapid young man living in
New York City, told without allusion, metaphor or
self-reference. Essentially, the kind of
airport-novel-taken-as-art for which Jay McInerney
and Brett Easton Ellis were once praised, and
then later reviled.

Bad enough to be hammered like that, but to be lumped with the truly
awful Bret Easton Ellis? Ouch! Perhaps it was simply the jealousy
that authors always seem to feel towards successful fellow writers.
Perhaps it was a generational thing; who was this punk kid to replace Hemingway's
wine drenched Paris with a coke sprinkled New York? And, of course,
his own generation was hardly going to defend an author who told them that
they were all shallow and wasting their lives. Whatever the cause,
the literary establishment has been so aggressively dismissive of him and
this novel that liking it feels almost like a guilty pleasure. But
I do like it very much.

The book is unusual in that it is written in the second person, which,
combined with the tone, makes the whole thing read, appropriately,
like an admonishment. It opens in a Manhattan night spot with the
line: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this
at this time of the morning." But, of course, that is exactly the
type of person that the nameless protagonist of the novel has become, hopping
from night club to night club, looking for cocaine and women, with "no
goal higher than pursuit of pleasure." He alternately avoids and
seeks out his friend Tad Allagash (Tad calls the hero Coach, so we will
too) because Tad represents the worst of his own personal tendencies, but
is also a ready source of drugs. Coach is well on his way to blowing
his job at a magazine that is a hilarious put on of the The New Yorker,
with burned out writers haunting the hallways. Eventually he is fired
after turning in an error filled piece on France that he was supposed to
be fact checking. We also discover that his wife Amanda has recently
abandoned him to pursue her modeling career. Coach has taken to wandering
by a department store window that has a dress dummy modeled after her.
Over the course of several days of avoiding responsibilities and the brother
who is trying to contact him, abusing coke & booze at every waking
moment, the remainder of Coach's life collapses around him.

McInerney's portrait of these young New Yorkers is truly devastating;
they are all surface with no depth. Coach remains friendly with Tad
because:

Just now you want to stay at the surface of things,
and Tad is a figure skater who never considers
the sharks under the ice. You have friends
who actually care about you and speak the language of
the inner self. You have avoided them of late.
Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and
until you clean up a little you don't want to invite
anyone inside.

Coach had doubts about marrying Amanda because:

You did not feel that you could open quite all of
your depths to her, or fathom hers, and sometimes
you feared she didn't have any depths.

Meanwhile, he finds himself asking, "when did she become a mannequin?",
because she is little different than her fiberglass doppelganger in the
store display. When he meets her in a nightclub at the end of the
novel, she is with an impossibly handsome young man who she claims is her
fiancé, but he turns out to be an escort. The woman Coach
is dancing with that night turns out to be transsexual. Noone is
real, like the neon lighting in which their lives unfold everything is
artificial; at best they are playing roles, at worst they are truly empty
at the core (they have become the "Men without Chests" that C.S. Lewis
warned of). Coach himself frames the episodes in his life as chapters
from a novel, complete with titles. It's as if he is incapable of
handling reality and must make a fiction of his own life, must turn himself
into a literary construct.

Finally, as he hits bottom, Coach begins to rebound. His brother
catches up to him and they discuss the loss of their Mother, who sickened
and died a year earlier. Coach is, at last, able to confront his
own sense of loss. He calls an old girlfriend and tells her:
"I was just thinking that we have a responsibility to the dead--the living,
I mean." The novel ends with him down at the docks, trading his sunglasses
for some fresh baked bread. Hard to avoid pedantry here, but the
bread pretty obviously represents the Staff of Life, the values of the
heartland and the pleasures of hearth and home, as well as a means of resurrection--in
the most fundamental sense, he is taking communion. Coach's decision
to abandon the bright lights (he won't need the sunglasses anymore) and
turn back towards the basics is a triumphal moment in modern fiction.

In an era when "white bread" has become pejorative, an author who has
his hero saved by a bread roll is obviously trying to communicate something.
It would be a shame if those same shallow folk whom the book is aimed at
were to succeed in dismissing it as no more than a "drug book".
It is a really fine novel and one of the few significant social fictions,
along with Bonfire of the Vanities and Love Always (see
review), to emerge from the 80's.